Maze of Many Alts a.k.a. FMK Realities List

[LAYF]

Possibly, there are just 218 parties within the FMK specification that haven't won the maze yet - ours did lose a lot, after all.

It is mathematically impossible to subtract any number from infinity and be left with less than "still infinity". That's kind of the whole point of infinity. If there are literally infinite realities in the Maze at any moment, then no amount of mere attrition can ever change that fact. So whether or not the limit of 218 originally existed, it must have been imposed at some point.

(Fixed your quotes)

Isn't it possible that while the total no. of realities is infinite, the number that meet the requirements to compete with FMK is very large, but finite?

well... yes... it is possible... but highly improbable....

to simplify.
say every humanoid in every reality is made up of 3 times 2d6
1a 1d6 = head type, 1b 1d6 = intelligence
2a 1d6 = torso type, 2b 1d6 = health
3a 1d6 = leg/arm type, 3b 1d6 = Strength/speed

lets set the maze requirement to be All head, torso and leg/arm types must be 3,4,5 or 6 (fitted to the atmosphere/physical laws of the maze) and intelligence, heath and strength must be 4,5 or 6 (sub human, human and super human)
now in this case only 1/6 or all realities will be allowed in per average.

it is possible that at some point the head die will seen to not produce anything but head type 1 or 2... and thus, the "thing" wont be compatible with the atmosphere of the maze, but it is unlikely it will do it for many times in a row...
if is courses more likely that just 1 of the 6 die will turn up to low for the maze. but even then, with an infinite number of rolls, it is just extreeeeeeemy unlikely that there wont always be just one more. the unlikeliness is so huge that most mathematicians would simply just say, nope, there will always be one more, and one more and so one.


probability bah... everything is impossibly possible no matter how improbably!

[smjjames]

Well yeah, if one of the alternates breathe methane, then unless the maze supplies them with apparatus for that, then they'd die before even leaving the starting room.

Same for low gravity adapted. Theres still room for really alien and bizarre alternates like that blademax.... thing. Probably more that Thunt chose not to make any alts that were vaguely humanoid or otherwise very alien, more alien than blademax that is.

[LAYF]

maybe the maze sorts through the "applicants" so that all the groups that are in at the same time is resembling each other in some way... since all groups either consists of the FMK, partly the FMK or in the most "different" Ace max. It looks like the maze actively selects its players, and seeing as there is an infinite number of possible applicants spaced over an seemingly infinite but definitely growing number of instances of the same maze over a time occurrence of absolute 0 seconds compared to the parent reality (They exit at the same time as they enter, but they play out more than 2 million rounds) I'm sure we simply just follow a "maze setting" that fits our air breathing, approx 9.8 m / s2 gravitational exposed life forms...

or in plain words: The maze we perceive is is filled with and fitted to things that resembles our known world, due to the fact that the people we follow (FMK) Is from a reality that, while very different from ours, do resemble it in most ways.
If you think about it, at one point there would have been approx 218 groups of silk scale clan Yuan-ti or the equivalents from other realities. seeing as Kin mentions her clan putting the tea pot here in the first place...

just my metaphorical 2 pieces of low value currency!

[Glemp]

If I may, in fiction alternate realities are shown as being unique - there is always some difference between the protagonists and the alt-world.
This in turn means that if you had some big list of every reality ever and searched for your own universe, you'd only get one result.
This in turn means that if you apply sufficiently strict parameters when searching for a reality, you will get finite results.
This in turn suggests that the number of alternate realities is not infinite, just very very very large.

[RedwoodElf]

If I may, in fiction alternate realities are shown as being unique - there is always some difference between the protagonists and the alt-world.
This in turn means that if you had some big list of every reality ever and searched for your own universe, you'd only get one result.
This in turn means that if you apply sufficiently strict parameters when searching for a reality, you will get finite results.
This in turn suggests that the number of alternate realities is not infinite, just very very very large.

Well, the number of alternate realities may in fact be infinite, but the number who fit the current parameters (Has an adventuring party that is seeking the Jade Teapot, or has at least one member who heard about the maze from someone who was seeking the Jade teapot) is large but finite.

[Krulle]

Well, every universe in any multiverse is unique, but the difference may be very small.
Just one single random decision having gone differently...
And it may not have been anywhere near ouf FMK.
One universe in the multiverse is different from ours, if, let's say, in Japan (which does not exist) one single distracted person said "yes" instead of "thanks" when he got his food at a fast-food counter.
And if that only happened about a split second before our FMK went into the portal, our FMK would be, for all that you can measure, be the same as FMK from the "yes"-Japan universe.

It's weird how many different FMK's we got to see, if alone the above example leads to an infinite number of alternative universes.

There is an infinite number of alternative universes, where the MoM has NOT been created.

Such things you should simply take at face value because it fits the story better than thinking about how it should be.
If THunt made it as he thinks it should be logical, he may have needed more than a few pages to explain why the multiverse looks like this.

(And non-life is surely even more dominant over life-universes than bad universes being more than good universes.... Just creating life by random collision of atoms is so unlikely, that you have an infinite number of multiverses where one of the many necessary random bumps failed, or even destroyed previous successful steps.)

[Glemp]

How many alt-verses there are in total doesn't matter - the point is that there are no realities that are exact duplicates of each other, which shows that with strict enough specifications there are only a finite number of contestants (presumably, Kin was using hyperbole). This in turn implies a very funny scenario where the last party (assuming that there aren't any that decide to deliberate lose every time for some reason) walks through with ease and takes their winnings, only to realise that they could only do it after every one else had died.

[EatsAPeach]

You could have plenty of realities which were almost identical. In World One, the janitor at the worst bar in Tijuana is named Juan. In World Two, he is named Chico. I am the same in both worlds; I have never been to Tijuana. You can even fine-tune it and say there's a World One-A in which Juan uses an old mop and a One-B in which he has a newer one. In every world, I go through the Maze, and since I have no self-hatred problems, we all just help each other run the Maze and win and go home fast.

[willpell]

You could have plenty of realities which were almost identical. In World One, the janitor at the worst bar in Tijuana is named Juan. In World Two, he is named Chico. I am the same in both worlds; I have never been to Tijuana. You can even fine-tune it and say there's a World One-A in which Juan uses an old mop and a One-B in which he has a newer one. In every world, I go through the Maze, and since I have no self-hatred problems, we all just help each other run the Maze and win and go home fast.

My logic is that these two worlds would blur together into each other, except for people who go to that bar or know the bartender, and that as chains of thirdhand and fourthhand associations with that one changed datapoint between the worlds are established, quantum forces oscillate whatever facts are not clearly fixed in memories or observed documentation, so that it is impossible to ever distinguish the two universes. So a multiversal rift would only form to separate the two worlds in the event that the "pressure" of those quantum forces grew too great, because there were too many data inconsistencies which couldn't hold in their superposition.

Thusly, if you sent a detective to that bar and he wrote one of the bartenders's names in his caefile, every time he showed that casefile to someone else, it would "slide" that section of reality into the proper dimension, up until such a time when too many such "slides" were pulling in opposite directions - maybe a TV reporter catches the name Chico on camera while your detective gives you a case file describing Juan, and so you read Juan on the file and then you sit down to watch the news program in which they're about to say Chico - at that point, the world splits, and in one of the split worlds the casefile retroactively always said Chico, and in the other the TV reporter retroactively always recorded a story about Juan. But probably just one person's contradictory experiences wouldn't be enough to force the break; they might just get confused, experience weird feelings of uncertainty about the facts, and then review their materials and fix a certain version of the truth in their heads. The world might constantly be fluctuating on such a low level and none of us would ever be quite sure, dismissing the variances as deja vu or hangovers or fuzzy half-memories of some long-ago dream, up until there were so many billions of such incidents constantly shifting that the whole world just rips sideways in the fifth dimension.

It makes sense to assume that as time moves forward, more and more alternate realities are created, since more choices have been made. My theory that reality has a quantum component accounts for this with a counterbalancing factor - the extra "space" in the past is taken up by possible versions of history that hadn't yet been proven inconsistent. Thusly, while there's a future in which Hilary Clinton becomes president, there's also a past in which fires really did burn because of phlogiston; that universe was destroyed the moment it was scientifically proven that phlogiston didn't exist, and a newly divergent timeline took its place. Thusly, the total number of possible universes remains constant; every tick of the clock converts one more universe from impossible-to-disprove alternate-past to no-longer-hypothetical alternate future.

[EatsAPeach]

Yeah, or it could be that the Maze just combines all the identicals into one person and separates them again as they step back out, since they'd have all reacted identically anyway. There's probably a Rule of Dissimilarity or something governing this.

[Krulle]

Any theory is as good as any other.
It's been created by magic, so...... any rules from our physics world do not necessarily apply.

[AntMac]

Any theory is as good as any other.
It's been created by magic, so...... any rules from our physics world do not necessarily apply.

Some infinities are bigger than others though.

( Your sig gets me everytime, how many times can my eyebrows shoot up like that before they sprain themselves, or throw a gear-chain out of line, I wonder? )

[Krulle]

Well, I am proud that the banhammer that finally hit me was swung by the creator of the community himself....

And I finally had a chance to have a Signature that's not a copy from one I've seen somewhere else...

[ExplodingDice]

That is the problem with infinities. Mathematically infinity can be large or small, slow or fast but in the end they are still infinite.

Now when it comes to infinite realities we have tools allowing us to limit the infinities, so to say, by setting up rules on how the variations in the infinite worlds occur.
Let me posit some criteria for setting the boundaries for our infinite worlds.
- There is a finite and unique starting point in space / time where there is but one world
- A new world is created at a specific point in the time-line where "something" happens that is quantifiable
- World lines can cross over each other and may or may-not create new world lines

This way the infinite all of a sudden becomes finite.
The numbers are very large but are manageable.
And remember, as sliders has shown, some realities result in the same thing, a dead world.
Think of the whole thing like a palm tree where the live worlds are the leaves and the dead ones lay scattered around the base like so much mulch.

[bknabe]

Any theory is as good as any other.
It's been created by magic, so...... any rules from our physics world do not necessarily apply.

Some infinities are bigger than others though.

( Your sig gets me everytime, how many times can my eyebrows shoot up like that before they sprain themselves, or throw a gear-chain out of line, I wonder? )

I was going to point out that there are different kinds of infinities, but you beat me to it - not hard to do since I read this 9 days after you wrote it. ;^)

That sig gets me every time, too.

[LooksClosely]

Just writing to thank speakswithmistakes for the great work!

[SpeaksManyLanguages]

Thanks!

[SpellsBedly]

I Always enjoy a good weird physics discussion, but as alternate universes that still have all the same individuals in them as the one you had been watching are already kind of a weird idea, I decided to look at this from another angle. For the purposes of spinning my story I'm ignoring the in-comic lines that strongly suggest that Minmax's player has come up with the name Minmax himself and stuff like that. My theory is: they're playing a commercially available adventure module, one that hands out characters for the players to customize. It's unusual, but the trick is that if everybody plays these characters, they can send in what the players made of them by the time they entered the maze, and those versions of the characters get put online for other players to use as NPC's inside the maze. That's why the maze pits these characters against alternate versions of their own group, but also contains alternate versions of NPC's, the players of those realities had someone join their adventure halfway through, or a player character died. The two million losses thing would in that case be nothing but flavor text. Psionic Minmax and the three Kin's are probably part of the module, or maybe the Kin's are what Herbert came up with to help his players win. He probably inserted a not-Walter alt himself as well, probably without thinking about what would happen next time his players met "their" version of the demon. (Or maybe the demon was actually part of the module, just not in quite the way Herbert used him, and there was actually a group of players out there that ended up like that.) It would explain how there are no realities in the maze in which the drow are still alive, either Herbert only used those realities where they didn't (or never started to begin with, or they were "original" characters to begin with (and in all honesty, a commercial module should probably be more ashamed of including those than a character called Minmax, so this seems likely).

Granted, the whole thing falls apart when you consider Kin's choice to stay in the maze, and when you start thinking about how the Goblin party has been running wild if they really were just NPC's in a game instead of people living in d&d-world. But still, it's a fun idea to mull around for a minute. There should be a module like that, like Spore for roleplayers.

And to tie the whole thing into a circle: yes, that would mean there's a large but finite number of alternate realities out there.

(And did I mention I like forum archeology? Although I guess it doesn't really count if the topic was sticky to begin with...)

[SpeaksManyLanguages]

[Just a note, in case anyone gets confused, i'm about to change my nickname on the forum, from SpeaksWithMistakes to SpeaksManyLanguages]
EDIT: that name was too long, so SpeaksManyLanguages.

[Glemp]

[Just a note, in case anyone gets confused, i'm about to change my nickname on the forum, from SpeaksWithMistakes to SpeaksNativeUkrainian]

...Why?

[SpeaksManyLanguages]

[Just a note, in case anyone gets confused, i'm about to change my nickname on the forum, from SpeaksWithMistakes to SpeaksNativeUkrainian]

...Why?

I didn't feel comfortable with the pejorative connotations

[Glemp]

[Just a note, in case anyone gets confused, i'm about to change my nickname on the forum, from SpeaksWithMistakes to SpeaksNativeUkrainian]

...Why?

I didn't feel comfortable with the pejorative connotations

Oh. That's very :|indeed, even verging into , especially with the value attached to your current name - the new one will feel so functional. But if you are uncomfortable, it is your prerogative. Goodbye, "SpeaksWithMistakes".

[Krulle]

Have you asked the admins (SeeAMoose) to do it for you? Or will you create a new account?

[SpeaksManyLanguages]

Have you asked the admins (SeeAMoose) to do it for you? Or will you create a new account?

I have asked the admins, yes. Posting on the forum prior to changing is one of the requirements.

[Krulle]

Okay. Let's see it happen, then...

(BTW: I just hope there's no "national" interest with the name. I loved your "SpeaksWithMistakes" name, but simply don't wish to evaluate if a nationality should appear in a setting like Thuntworld.... But if you're mothertongue is Ukranian, then the name would just speak truth. )
I wouldn't want to be known as SpeaksNativeGerman, as there are more native German speakers here than just me.

What about SpeaksManyLangualternatives? (a mixture of Languages and Alternatives) - Yikes, I wouldn't want to enter that into the login interface everytime.
KnowsManyAlternatives?

Anyway, your choice, IMHO.

So, welcome SpeaksNativeUkrainian!


You're not the first case of namechange.
LooksAtYouFunny is the most recent example.
I remember another one, but there were other reasons....